The Desert Mermaid

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice

• The Cooking Hypothesis suggests that the invention of cooking precipitated a rapid evolutionary change in humans, allowing them to more efficiently process nutrients and, of course, growing bigger brains. I always said cooking was an important part of humanity, dangit!


• Nancy Kerrigan was filmed right after being attacked sobbing and asking "Why? Why?"--and a lot of people thought she was being a wimp or a drama queen because she was only bruised. Dude, it still hurts, but quite apart from that, when you get attacked, it's probably TERRIFYING and it HURTS YOUR FEELINGS.


• The difference between triple axels, triple spins, triple lutzes, etc., has to do with where you push off from and what direction you're facing and okay fine I've already forgotten.


• Flavoring sodas is a lot like brewing tea. Really sugary tea.


• But brown sugar makes them taste rather bitter.


• Also, soda-brewing is similar to making beer, except you don't let the yeast go far enough to make alcohol.


• Furthermore, there is a lot of argument over just what the "cream" in "cream soda" refers to. Vanilla? Adding cream to the soda? Or cream of tartar? It's a HISTORY MYSTERY.


• In tangentially-related soda discoveries, SodaStream is a company fraught with political tensions and controversy.


• Cloth pads and panty liners are surprisingly expensive, but also surprisingly worth it.


• There is a constellation in the Southern Hemisphere called "The Poop." Yes, it refers to a ship's stern (poop deck), BUT STILL. HURRRR.


• There are, naturally, all sorts of recipes for Ent-Draught on the internet.


• Mainlining Atop The Fourth Wall has taught me something I always rather thought: I have terrible comic-reading comprehension. I do okay with some, mostly in comic strip form, but it takes me a long time to parse each page, way longer than it takes to read straight prose, so if I'm going to read a comic, I have to be committed. And even then I have trouble regarding them critically.*


• I did learn, however, that lots of people find it extremely difficult to keep comic continuity straight. Comic writers, for instance. Case in point: Donna Troy.


• The director of Tremors is Ron Underwood, who got his start in the film industry making educational shorts for Barr Films--such as one of my favorite Rifftrax-featured shorts, Library World.


• My mom, who watched very little TV as a kid, nevertheless has strong opinions about what Mr. Peabody's voice sounds like.


• Mork & Mindy was a spinoff of Happy Days.  Clearly, I never watched either of them.


• Getting feedback on your novel can be a mixed bag. You get excited that you can make it better, but frustrated when you can't tell if the feedback makes sense.


• Publishing a serial story online gets more difficult with each installment because there's a lot to keep track of. BUT DAMMIT IT'S STILL POSSIBLE.


• You can unclog standard drain clogs with the use of science fair volcano technology.


• After you turn into the left-turn-lane, it's legal to drive 500 freaking feet in that lane. Which is almost a whole block even here in Salt Lake City.


• The Beautiful Creatures movie might be adapted from a novel of the same name, but don't let that fool you. It is clearly a remake of The Touch of Satan.


• The first female-directed movie ever to gross more than $1 billion is Frozen. Which is awesome, but dang, it took a while to get there. Let's hope this is a good precedent!

*Interestingly, though, I read a lot of Archie comics as a kid. It fascinated me the same way 1950s Educational Shorts fascinate me--it shows some weird whitebread cultural ideal that somehow I can't look away from.

I have managed to make a cream soda that tastes exactly like drinking a fizzy cinnamon bun.

... I will try to use this newfound power only for good, but realistically I can make no promises.

So they've found that there's water in Martian soil, but that it'll take some processing to actually get to it. Well, that'll be handy once we get up there and start to HOLY SHIT WAIT A SECOND.

MOISTURE FARMERS. The water is eventually going to have to be extracted by MOISTURE FARMERS.

That's right. We are one step closer to living in a Star Wars universe.

God DAMN, science is good.

The Basics: They went looking for stuff. And then they were surprised when they found it.

You Are About To Read A Comment About Framing Devices. Here It Comes: Europa Report runs into another trap in the mockumentary genre I claim to like so much: over-framing. The movie feels like a really long first act, with a lot of inexplicably nonlinear storytelling, crazily over-edited camera shots, and redundant narration. You know, that voiceover giving you really USEFUL information. "You're about to see a bunch of footage from the Europa mission. Here it is now. The footage, I mean. So this is the footage we were watching, too. And now you're watching it. About a trip. To Europa."

Even the exciting climax, in which ( that one thing happens, ) is immediately dulled by their ground crew PR lady helpfully summarizing what we just saw.

It would be like the buildup in the original Alien being twice as long, and then John Hurt decides to stick his face in a giant alien egg, and the facehugger springs out and gets all violatey and then--we cut to some Weyland or Yutani telling the camera, "In that fateful moment, John Hurt totally stuck his face in an alien egg zone, and then a big ugly thing jumped out and attached itself to his helmet. Boy, that sure scared us when we watched the footage! Anyway, movie's over." And then the credits roll, leaving you wondering where the rest of the story went. It was disappointing, is what I'm saying.

Robot Roll Call: It felt rather like one of any dozen 50's sci-fi B-movies featured on MST3k. Right down to the international crew's roll call. That made me laugh.

A Thing I Liked: The science was cool, though. I especially liked that the characters never turned into the hysterical idiots you usually find in these movies. They were Doing Science, dangit, and they were professionals. So refreshing.

Another Thing I Liked: There's a part when ( another thing happens. ) That was pretty excellent. But then nobody mentions it again and it doesn't really build from there, and that is disappointing.

An Actor I Liked: It's good to see the Ice Truck Killer getting work. (An ENTIRE PLANET of ice! IT IS LIKE HEAVEN!) He has a really interesting face.

Overall: I was hoping for more.

ALSO: Not even Mind-Blowing Genre-Defying Indie Movies are immune from basic movie rules. Never show anyone a photo of your loved ones back home. Unless you're feeling suicidal.

So Discovery aired a kind of sequel to Mermaids: The Body Found last week, and just like when the first one came out last year, and with that dragon one some years back, it raises an important and intriguing question:

Dude, am I the only one who thought it was just a really fun sci-fi mockumentary?

The only opinions I've really seen are "OMG I'M CONVINCED MERMAIDS R TOTALLY REAL AND THE GOVERNMENT IS COVERING IT UP" and "TRICKERY! This is naught but a HOAX you fools! It is trashy TV to ensnare unwary minds!" It's like for this particular series people forget that speculative fiction is a thing. Admittedly the documentary format is more prone to being misunderstood than your standard SyFy Original or blockbuster,* but c'mon. They are not trying to tell us The Truth, or to confuse the masses with falsehood. They are being creative and playing with science and story.

Anyway, I was kind of disappointed with the follow-up. I really liked the first one--I'm a total sucker for grain-of-science mockumentaries like that. And given that my school biology notes were covered with speculative attempts to design biologically viable, evolutionarily plausible mammalian mermaids (who are going to show up in OGYAFE 2: Electric Boogaloo), or fungal Mushroom People (y'know, the Super Mario ones), or plant-based fairies (like, say, Terwu'arie from Scatterstone), I would say that shouldn't be a surprise. I love making up critters. Hell, the game Spore was just an extension of what I've been doing all along. Only I do it more thoroughly.

But I am also a sucker for speculative anthropology.** So while the ~*~mysteeeerious mystery*~* of cryptozoology was fun, and I do rather enjoy creepy "found" footage, I would have preferred more of a staight-up metafictional study of their evolution and culture. As long as this IS fiction, I do wish they'd carry the story further. Public discovery, contact, language, all that shit that people think doesn't work as entertainment--I would watch the HELL out of that. ("Since making contact with the merfolk, Dr. Dirk Squarejaw has been living on his boat in the open ocean, studying their lifestyle. He filmed the whole thing. Here are some of the highlights." I WOULD WATCH THAT. I might even skip watching 7 Or 8 Assholes And Mister Rogers, if the two shows were in the same time slot. God, TV is so much cooler in my head.)

... Actually, come to think of it, that was pretty much my wish for Avatar, too. But you knew that.


RANDOM POINTLESS COMPLAINT: It kind of annoys me that they kept referring to the entire species as "mermaids." I hereby propose we come up with a good sex-unspecific term for merpeople that isn't as cumbersome as, y'know, "merpeople."


*Their big mistake was tossing in the Government Coverup. If you're a conspiracy theorist, any debunking of that is only further proof that the debunker is PART OF THE CONSPIRACY. There is no way to argue with the claim that "they had to present it as fiction because otherwise the government/Illuminati/lizard people would have completely crushed it."

**Or anthropoidology, I guess.

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice

• Dyslexia can cause difficulty in word retrieval in speech as well as in writing.


• The original edition of The Hobbit mentioned policemen. For some reason, I find this far weirder than the business I already knew about the Riddles in the Dark scene being so much less awesome at first.


• Lisa Frank is still around, but she's gotten rather weird.


• Retired AG items are on eBay for reasonable prices, and apparently inside I am still ten years old and WANTING them.


• Yuri Gagarin's flight into space was even more awesome than I thought, because it turns out his reentry strategy was basically to jump back to Earth.


• Fi, from Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, apparently does have real arms under her wings/cape.


• Netting requires its own special knots.


• The history of matches is long and crazy, and features poison, disintegrating jaws, and explosions. Which is kind of awesome.


• I don't have astigmatism; I just have myopia. This means I do not have football-shaped eyeballs; they are simply oblate spheroids.


• It is possible to get completely absorbed just classifying the hell out of images of distant galaxies. For SCIENCE!


• Snow can smash up your roof pretty impressively.


• You can totally make yourself a fluffernutter on the International Space Station.


• Prescription sunglasses are the bomb.


• MRI chambers act as Faraday cages to keep out external radio forces.


• Speaking of MRIs, apparently dybbuks show up on them.


• Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is the most adorable plushie ever made.


• The term for delicious potato chips and cream puffs and other such things is "supernormal releaser," which is a fancy way of saying "too much of a good thing," since back in Ye Olden Times it was really difficult to come across fat and salt and sugar, so your body is still convinced it should stuff them into your face whenever you come across them. That I knew, but I didn't know the term for them.


• Writing on a deadline, even a self-imposed one, is rough.


• Horror movies in theaters are a very different experience from horror movies alone in your room in the dark.


• Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major is an impressive bit of music to watch being performed.*


• Cats and toy trains are natural enemies.


• My confusion regarding a certain specific idiom in Irish accents is a direct result of David Eddings' confusion regarding the same.  When I learned that the phrase "I'm after [verb]ing" meant "I've just been [verb]ing," I thought for some reason it was counter-intuitive--it seemed like it should mean "I'm gonna [verb]"--but I didn't know why.  It's only after rereading The Belgariad and Malloreon that I realized that it's because Eddings uses the expression in his "Wacite brogue" accent, where it does mean "I'm gonna [verb]."  I picked up that meaning in junior high and it stuck with me after I'd forgotten the source.**


• In Tolkien's mythos, Fëanor was the one who came up with the Tengwar. Yet another addition to the list of atrocities he perpetrated on the Firstborn of Ilúvatar.


• Popes can retire.


• Mister Rogers answered every single letter he got. Which is a gargantuan task, because by god he was MISTER ROGERS.

*I've always rather wanted to see that one. It gets mentioned on an episode of M*A*S*H and I was always intrigued by the idea of writing a concerto for someone who had lost their right hand. So when my friend invited me to the symphony, I was not disappointed when they changed the program due to the pianist's having an injury on his right hand because hey, that meant I finally got to hear the left-handed piece.

**Even back then I knew that Eddings had some fanciful ideas about linguistics, but I did not notice that one specifically.

Woo Darwin Day!

Have some David Attenborough.

That's a lot of planets.

I'm starting to wonder if we might actually find alien life while I'm still around to witness it. Sure, we probably won't GET to it, but then I never really thought we'd be spotting planets at this point, anyway. It would be amazing to check out some other lifeforms even if they're just little one-celled wonders, but I'd be pleased just to know for sure that it's out there. It seems statistically absurd that at least ONE other planet wouldn't have something growin' on it.

Hey, I can dream.

So the Neil Armstrong display we had at work is already down, leaving behind a rather hollow feeling.

At first I was a little surprised: I didn't think I'd be quite so broken up about his death.* But the moment I got the news, it brought home, in ways that XKCD chart could not, that at this point the most astounding thing we've ever done is something in the past. Neil didn't open a floodgate. It was just a blip.

On the one hand, I'm perversely glad--he lived his whole life as a unique, mind-boggling explorer. Moonwalkers aren't exactly commonplace, so he kept a distinction in life and death that we might not have perceived had we continued traveling there and established permanent bases or an amusement park WITH BLACKJACK! AND HOOKERS! or something.**

But on the other hand, I really hope his death does for others what it did for me--reminds us that if we don't do something soon, we are going to run out of people who can remember standing on ANOTHER FUCKING PLANET. And we need people who know, in the way only experience can teach you, that IT CAN BE DONE. I don't want to lose that certainty. I don't want to have to start over.

So I toast you: Neil and the other three vanished Moon Men, and another toast to the eight we still have. You guys know it's possible. Keep reminding us.


*Possibly because I wasn't entiredly convinced he could die. The other Apollo dudes were, y'know, dudes, but I've been under the subconscious impression that the Apollo 11 guys were selected because they were indestructible.

**Of course, even now some of his distinction has waned rather patheticlally. I went to work on August 25th and kept telling people "Neil Armstrong died!" and everyone under 40 replied with "Aww, after all this steroid scandal, too!"

Before the day is over, I just want to remind everyone that on a July 20th, this happened:



We should do that again sometime!

As awesome badass Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "July 20, 1969 -- "Men Walk On Moon" -- The only positive event in the last 50 years for which everyone remembers where they were when it happened."

(Although The Onion's comment had a certain ring to it, too.)